Recently we've been into baking bread. Like, traditional easy bread thats tastey and available kinda quick after you've decided you wanted bread for dinner or supper. Anyhow those simple baguett-like yeast bread, even though they require quite some trying around to be able to properly handle the yeast properly to achieve a even fluffyer result have gotten somehow boring. So we thought we might give a tip by the Mum of a friend a try.

Thats a special kind of yeast thats harvested from natural yeasts in honey carried in by bees from various sources (yeasts exist all over the world, thats how beer and bread used to work in medieval ages). Its called "Backferment" (no translation found, sorry) and was developed by Hugo Erbe around the beginning of the century.

The making is somehow troublesome and similar to sourdough, you first need a quite fluid base which consists of:

- 150g flour type 405

- 150g freshly ground wholemeal flour

- 300-400g water

- 10g Backferment

and that needs to stand at ~28*C for a day. You should see quite some bubbles rising after that. After that you need yet another base, the breads sponge which is a bit less fluid (300g of any flour, 20-30g of the base and 5g Backferment) and yet again needs to stand a half day to swell and expand. Again bubbles should be clearly visible. The rest is easy, add another 700-800g of any flour, salt, oil and whatnot to your liking knead, let rest for 2 hours (or better: until it starts to collapse slightly again), bake until finished, thats it.

The result was astonishing, a slight, mild taste like sourdough, but not as harsh as real sourdough. It was super fluffy, but IMO with 1/3 freshly ground wholemeal flour it tasted a bit too solid, so 100% type 405 is my recommendation :). In any case, Backferment is worth the trouble and produces a bread thats quite different from regular yeast white bread and sourdough bread. Its uniqueness is expressed in a mild, pleasant taste that reminds of sourdough.

For anyone whos eager to try some new breadmaking techniques and play around, Backferment is sure one of the ways to go :). Be also sure to check back as we try out specific recipes for great breads. As soon as the look of the is up to a nice standard we'll also post pictures :P. Bon appetit!

Hey, Eefi here~! I made one of my favorite headgears from Ragnarok Online! This plushie emerged from the attempt whether the sewing pattern for Poring's body works for other not so regular shapes as well. Apparently, it does although I had to make a few changes. I don't have any in progress pictures since I wasn't sure if it'd work out and I'm not that keen to make a second one in the near future. The arrow is a somewhat of a pain to make and everything has to be sewn by hand! (Which is the major downside because it takes ages!) If you're lucky and your sewing machine is tamed to the extend so you can sew veeery slow, do it with the machine. Our's isn't, making every curved stitch nearly impossible.

As Jabber does not seem appropriate for a SMS-replacement (the clients just don't to survive connection changes from wifi->3g, 3g->E, etc.) i've been looking for something different. E-Mail is nice, just the shortest polling-interval of 15minutes is not suited for realtime communication. So - theres Push Email (meaning the iPhone will hold a HTTP connection to some server open all the time and the server writes something to that stream as soon as a new mail arrives) for various services including Microsoft Exchange and GMail. How about you hosting a own server since you don't want to give away all your data? No problem - either use one of the tons of commercial servers supporting Push or use Z-Push with your favorite IMAP and SMTP server.